ASK TONY: My father died with Santander owing him £10,000 - so where is it?

My late father had a mortgage with Cheltenham & Gloucester that is still ongoing. I am executor of his estate and discovered more than a year after his death that he held a Santander payment care policy to cover his mortgage payments.

Santander says the policy expired on June 2, 2011, which was after my father’s death on May 9, 2011, so the policy was still in force.

I have contacted Santander on numerous occasions and despite complying with all their requests for a death certificate and grant of probate, I am making no progress.For the last year of my father’s life he was in hospitals and finally a hospice. I therefore believe Santander should pay the mortgage repayments for this time.

Mrs A. M., Swanley, Kent.

Santander owed my dad £10,000

Sometimes, I despair of the way banks treat those who are winding up the affairs of deceased relatives.

It is hard enough having to cope with the death of a loved one without a bank piling on stress through sheer incompetence.

It appears your father had been sick for a year before his death, so you had already suffered considerable trauma.

Instead of making this insurance claim simple and streamlined, Santander once again cocked things up. You made your claim on July 11, 2012. Santander acknowledged this and returned the copy of the death certificate you had sent. But it failed to return the grant of probate so you had to chase this.

On August 22, six weeks after your first letter, Santander returned this and promised to be in touch ‘in due course’. This is English for manana.

I received your letter in November and chased Santander, whose underwriter, Aviva, then requested more information from you.

Finally £9,924 was credited to your executor’s account. This payment included an extra £248.10 compensation as Aviva rounded up the claim to a full year. Santander also sent a bouquet of flowers and issued you with an apology.

We reported our faulty phone line to BT a year ago and it still hasn't been fixed

BT trouble: 'We reported to BT a full year ago - five engineers have come to the property'

I have an ongoing problem with BT. We have a phone line that does not work.

When we make calls, after a few seconds or minutes there will be a constant bleeping sound leading to the call being cut off. On broadband this manifests itself as a loss of connection.

We reported this to BT a full year ago. Five engineers have come to the property (we were under threat of being charged if they hadn’t found a fault).

The last three simply carried out unnecessary work of replacing cabling their predecessor had put in to save us being charged.

They indicated the problem was at the main exchange and different investigations needed to be undertaken, but BT refused to do this.

Ms S. D., Bristol.

You seem to have hit an impasse with BT. And I think it’s time to draw a line under what’s gone wrong in the past and start again.

You went to the Ombudsman, who awarded you £50 for inconvenience.

BT tells me it has conducted a thorough investigation outside your house and can still find nothing wrong. Its engineers are therefore convinced the problem lies within your house. But it says you will no longer provide access.

BT has promised it will not charge for putting this fault right, whatever is causing it. So, I suggest that you stop digging in your heels and let them do their job.

I lost out on Nectar points when my mortgage fell into arrears, even though payments were up-to-date

House: It seems my mortgage has fallen into arrears, but no one has any clue why

Since 2007, I have paid my mortgage the same way. The bulk comes from a standing order I pay myself and the interest is paid by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), due to four illnesses I suffer from.

Every year I have received £150 worth of Nectar points. But this year I received a letter saying that if my mortgage, which is with Sainsbury’s Bank, fell into arrears, I would not receive any points.

It seems my mortgage has fallen £8.42 into arrears, but no one has any clue why.

The only thing I can think of is that in the summer the DWP contacted my wife to say that Sainsbury’s had returned their money and said my account was closed. I had to act as the middleman between Sainsbury’s and the DWP to resolve this.

Please can you help?

M. H., Stoke.

Well, it seems your account got into a bit of a muddle. This was through no fault of yours, and Sainsbury’s Bank admits you did not ‘receive our usual high standards of customer care’.

It seems that your mortgage required payments to be made into two accounts.

However, your payment and the one from DWP were made only to the primary account, which meant the secondary one fell into arrears.

I suspect this muddle happened at around about the time the DWP payment was returned.To prevent a similar situation occurring, Sainsbury’s has agreed to merge your two accounts into one.

It has arranged for the 30,000 Nectar points you should have received to be credited to your card and has added a further 6,000 points for distress and inconvenience. In total, these points are worth £180 if you spend them at a Sainsbury’s store.

But as you will know they can also be used at plenty of other outlets including Argos, easyJet and Vue cinemas, or you could even donate them to Oxfam or Action for Children. Sainsbury’s has apologised for any distress and inconvenience caused.

Straight to the point

Can
you provide some information about the best credit card for new
purchases? I need a card to fund a holiday to mark a family event.

S. V., London.

You
should consider cards offering a long interest-free period on new
purchases. According to data firm Moneyfacts, Halifax’s Purchase Credit
Card MasterCard has 17 months interest-free, followed by interest at
16.9 pc.

Will the State Second Pension and SERPS top-ups to the basic state pension continue to get increased by inflation every year after the new flat-rate system comes in? A. B., by email.

Yes. Top-ups to the state pension will continue to be paid out if they are above the £144 mark in today’s prices.

They will continue to rise each year with inflation as measured by the Consumer Prices Index.

In the Seventies, the Government signed an agreement with Iceland that limited British fishing boats in Icelandic waters. As a result, my livelihood was hit. I have been living abroad, but when I returned to the UK, I heard there was a compensation scheme for people in my position.

R. B., Dumfries.

A £25 million compensation scheme was launched by the Government back in 2000 and then reopened in 2009. It has since closed.

However, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is handing out £1,000 to 2,500 trawlermen as a consolation for mis-administration of the 2009 scheme.

For full details and to see if you qualify, visit bis.gov.uk and search for ‘trawlermen’.

I paid around £100 for my family to travel by train between York and Peterborough one very cold day last month.

Because a door was broken and the train was full we were forced to sit in freezing temperatures for nearly two hours. I wrote to the railway firm to complain. It replied, unbelievably, saying the temperature in the train was always kept ‘at least 10 degrees below that outside’.

Surely this can’t be right?

P. R., Harrogate.

We contacted East Coast Rail. It confirms the customer service adviser who dealt with your query gave you the wrong response and apologises for your unpleasant experience.

However, despite multiple requests from Money Mail, it is still refusing to make any gesture in return for this shoddy treatment.